Editor's note: This version corrects the name of the event to GMB Muziekparade.

Unofficially, Tulip Time organizers may have scored the largest GMB Muziekparade crowd since 1997 — went the buzz along Eighth Street as the festival's finale began a 2.5-mile march through town Saturday afternoon.

Despite temperatures hovering just below 50, gusting wind that sent petals from flowering trees into the crowd like so much confetti and a light rain, few seemed to mind. Jean DenHerder walked Eighth Street with her daughter Martha, 15, looking for a seat where they could spot Martha's friends in Holland High's marching band.

"I've been coming to Tulip Time for 26 years," Jean DenHerder said. "And this week has been perfect — well, (looking at the gray sky) not exactly perfect, but close. The tulips have never looked better an they Go Dutch!"

Ashley Moore drove from Lansing, Ill., to meet friends Emily Niespodziewanski and Terry Streetman from Lansing, Mich., in Holland. All three have visited West Michigan in the past, but never for Tulip Time, they said.

"We were going to come last year, but the weather ..." Streetman said, ending with a shrug. That's one reason, he said, the friends made it a point to come this year and the trip was worth it.

More more than 30 years, Kerry Wheeler has marched in Tulip Time parades. Saturday was his last. The Harbor Lights Middle School band teacher will trade in his baton to sell cars for Crown Motors for practical reasons — at 53, he's thinking about retirement.

"It seems like a big jump, but it's really just talking to people and helping them," he said. Wheeler graduated from West Ottawa High to follow in the footsteps of his mentor and role model, high school band director Gary Lucas. Wheeler's most memorable Muziekparade is easily the sleep-deprived experience on May 14, 1988. Days earlier, he'd told his then-pregnant wife Rhonda, due on June 1, not to have their second child on that Saturday.

"I told her it'd be difficult to find a sub for the parade," he recalled. But he was up until 2 a.m. with Rhonda and their new son, Tyler. He arrived for the parade to find students ready with a banner proclaiming, "'It's a boy.' I marched under that and that's how I announced to my family and friends," he said. Thinking of Saturday's last Muziekparade, he choked up.

Tyler Wheeler, once his dad's band student and on a high school golf team coached by his dad, said that "lesson in objectively" has given way to full admiration for the man who's been "a phenomenal success" so far.

"He has such a sense of community ... I used to play a game and say, 'Let's see how long we can go around Holland without seeing anyone who knows you,"Tyler said. "Very rarely did we get home without seeing people, unless we went to a drive-through and only saw one person .. I i feel like my dad's been a cornerstone for doing things the right way."

Page 2 of 2 - Families of many of Wheeler's students waited along the parade route, including Amy Farrell of Park Township, whose daughter Maddie marched with Wheeler's band. Two of Farrell's older children also took Wheeler's class, she said, learning two valuable lesson. "It's important to be at all parades, especially Memorial Day, and to make sure you have a water bottle."

But his main lesson, she said, was showing students the importance of community.

"We're all Dutch at Tulip Time," Farrell said, adding that her own family is Irish-Italian. "It's great to be part of our community."